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Teachers are not on strike. Nor according to the leaders of the two major unions involved, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, do they intend to go on strike.

They may have walked away from province-wide talks with the Liberal government. But as required under Ontario labour law, they have been bargaining with the local school boards that employ them.

Certainly the boards didn’t ask Queen’s Park to step in. Most apparently thought they could reach deals with their employees.

So why is the government attacking teachers?

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My astute colleague Martin Regg Cohn has pointed to the politics of the situation. The Liberals are desperate to win two Sept. 6 by-elections in order to gain a majority of seats in the provincial legislature. They reckon that taking on the unions will play particularly well in one riding, Kitchener-Waterloo, that has traditionally elected Tories.

But beyond this, the McGuinty Liberals are suffering from the same myopia that seems to affect so many provincial governments.

They are focusing on the province’s deficit, now $15 billion, rather than the economic circumstances that created this shortfall.

Those circumstances have to do with a faltering economy that through job loss and weakened consumer demand is starving government of revenues.

A far-sighted government would focus on restarting the economy and raising those revenues. A near-sighted government, like this one, focuses on reducing spending alone — with no thought as to how such cuts might further hobble the overall economy.

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The McGuinty Liberals aren’t the first to make this fundamental error. Bob Rae’s New Democrats did the same in the early ’90s, with results — such as nursing shortages — that took years to repair.

Even more than the Rae New Democrats (who at least spread the unnecessary pain around) the McGuinty Liberals are looking for public-sector workers to pay for a recession they did not create.

According to Statistics Canada, overall wages in Ontario, private and public, have gone up by 3 per cent over the past year. Average wages paid to managers, both private and public, have jumped by 7.4 per cent.

Yet this government wants public-sector workers to get less than nothing. Even the unions’ offer for a zero increase isn’t enough. The Liberal bill would arbitrarily strip away benefits that were previously bargained and keep all but the newest teachers at journeyman wage rates.

And if teachers don’t like it, there is little they can do. The bill would not let them withdraw their labour in protest.

If teachers were deemed essential workers, such a strike ban might make sense. Police officers, for instance, can’t go on strike.

But if teachers were defined as essential workers, the government would have to treat them fairly. It wouldn’t be able to impose a settlement. It would have to let an impartial arbitrator decide.

And my guess is that no impartial arbitrator would give teachers less than nothing.

Tim Hudak’s Conservatives are at least up front on this issue. Hudak seems to believe that unions are evil. He is an honest troglodyte.

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